Saturday, April 7, 2012

Holy Saturday

I've got to say what a beautiful day it has been today. I got up earlier than I would have liked, but that was my last complaint. I rushed to get the props for the rehearsal of the play I wrote last year which will be performed on Tuesday evening, got to dress up actors and play with my own language with them, and we had to go outside in all our finery for a fire drill, which was just added absurdity (and a validation of my plan to overestimate the time I needed for rehearsal). Then I had just enough time to come home, eat lunch, and set up the crochet set before Amanda's bridal shower - which was just epically lovely. So many people that I love, SO much good food I couldn't finish all of it, three rousing games of crochet with lots of blowing bubbles to accompany it, the retelling of everyone's favorite Dan and Amanda stories (which, seriously, "they are like a Ryan Gosseling movie"), and a truly epic round of gifts. Then I made the risotto stuff I get from Kroger for Clara and Amanda while we talked about our past shows and current lives (Amy also present for talking but not eating). Now I'm trying to get some work done with the gold of the sunset peeking between the leaves of the tree outside my kitchen window.

Thank You, Lord, for such a glorious day.

I've been thinking about what kind of entry to do today. I don't want to start another woman, but I'm not sure how I'd even begin a retrospective of all the women that I've looked at here. Wait, now I know where I'd start! I think I will pick my favorite line, paragraph, etc. of each woman (or perhaps each day? each monologue? Will that be too long? We'll see!). Hopefully, they will end up somewhat artfully arranged. Here we go!

ELIZABETH

I bore the weight for him: my son whom all the things of this world could not touch.

JOANNA

Salome danced when she thought she was alone. But she was never alone. I used to stand transfixed whenever I saw her. Most people in Herod's palace did....when she danced, all her silken chains fell to the floor, and she was bursting forth, pouring forth from some deep font deep within. Bursting to live. She never felt their gazes, but they were there. And one day, her uncle-father and aunt-mother demanded that she dance for their guests. Did she guess? Guess that they were binding her up in new chains? At first she danced as freely as before, but then she stumbled, just for a moment. And in that moment: she felt them. Hundred of male eyes devouring her, as if they were one leering trap. For all her bursting, flowing movements, she only weaved their gazes more and more around her own body. And when she fell still, she fell silent. Everyone did. She silenced everyone with her dance. Herself most of all.

WIDOW OF ZAREPHATH

The sins that start to come easier and easier, to fall faster and faster, as everyone begins to slowly starve to death. The charity refused, the crumbs stolen, the hope crushed under your heel. The advantage taken. The slow contraction of whom you consider it your responsibility to save.

PILATE'S WIFE

I had seen the world, more than most Roman women, and I knew that there was real suffering. But I did little, because I was waiting for a singular moment of clarity. I was waiting for a message, a sign, or just some understanding of what was beyond myself. I was drifting, waiting, straining my ears and blocking out everything in the world around me.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

With the second wedding there was more gossip than bustle about me, but they were approving. Less sympathetic when he died. My third marriage ended in divorce, and that's when half the talk became whispers in ears and behind backs. By the fourth, whom I never actually married though I began to claim I had, I was like some attraction, some foreign seller of wonders barking in the streets of Jerusalem. I swear I saw money exchanged on the fifth. By then they were shunning me. The glares and lectures had died away into contempt and silence. I admit I took a perverse pleasure in how I could silence them, cut through the crowd and take my water quickly because no one wanted me there. But such things lose their charm quickly. Soon all you see is what they intended: the rejection.

MENSTRUATING WOMAN

It had been so long since I had touched even members of my family. You cannot imagine what that was like - to live at home, sequestered and shut up from the world, and even among my own family too unclean to touch. Impure and unclean. When the doctors stopped coming, it felt like the walls were sealed shut.

MARY MAGDALENE

I was possessed by seven demons. That's enough for a civil war between your wrist and elbow. They had tormented me so long I began to think of myself in terms of them - as if the several demons were my component parts. And I had forgotten myself long ago.

MIRIAM

I thought my mother had finally gone mad, bringing our baby to the river. I was screaming, she told me later. She had to put her hand in my mouth almost to the wrist to quiet me, and I bit right through her hand, still screaming. Trust in God? Where was God, she told me later that I screamed. Where was God when Pharoah came for our babies?

DELILAH

I lay beside him in the night, this beautiful fool lying beside me with no fear. Naked, utterly exposed, and yet at peace - not one whit of the terror I had summoned the courage to face every day of my life. I watched his chest rise and fall, and I told myself that whatever the propaganda said, he was not the entire Israelite army. The chance that he killed them was still small. And I wished, as I looked at his beautiful face in the moonlight, wished that the chance was smaller.

LAPA

I love that Catherine stands so strong. That she sees the world so clearly. I love that she of all my children shows the light I saw insider her father to the world most clearly. I love watching her stand with my strength and practically and think at last, Jacopo, between us we got the balance magnificently right. But I can't help thinking what Giovanna would be doing now. How close she would be. Infinitely closer than Avignon. I can't help thinking of Giovanna. The girl I thought that Catherine would be.

PRISCA

Aquila and I knew our job was to be the still, quiet voice keeping everyone from bedlam. Paul was the voice crying out in the marketplace, calling from the rooftops, making trouble. That's what you need at the start, and the rebuke you need when things have gone south. But there's a place in between, where the building of the Church happens. That is where we worked.

MARTHA

If I had sent for Him sooner, He would have come in time. This is the thing I know, deep down in my bones, as I prepare my brother for burial. That this is my pride. And my foolish fear for the man who is also the Son of God. Because He is my friend, and I want to protect Him. Protect the man I know is protected by God. Protect the man I have seen do wonders. Protect the prophet who walked through a crowd of people who wanted to stone Him with no harm done. Protect the Messiah and Son of God from mere petty men.

RUTH

And when Naomi spoke of her God, it was as if He told her every day how much He loved her. Not in some great spectacle down at the temple sacrifice, not in a blaze of fiery glory, nor with the amorous intentions of the Greek stories, but just like her husband did, a small moment before she went to sleep, a quick reminder in the morning before she rose to go about her day.

WIDOW OF ZAREPHATH

I had kept it guarded as a kind of close secret, lest they beg for food I could not take from my son's mouth. Lest a more worthy of the town take Elijah in and leave us to starve. Now I shared my joy. My blessing. The abundance of grace and peace I had been shown, when I was willing to settle for so little.

DELILAH

I watched him chained to the pillars. I watched him pulling against the chains, his face serene as it had always been in prayer, but every muscle in his body struggling as he never had before. In pain, as he never was before, but fighting all the same. Fighting still, still in love with His God. The strain of a miracle written across his body, suddenly so exposed to my view. The pain that could not stop him from fighting or loving. God never did abandon him. And all I could say as the walls came tumbling down was, "Oh, my love, my love."

MARTHA

When I heard that He had come, that Jesus was here, I was off like a cat out of an oven. I didn't notice that I dropped five pots and scrambled over them in my haste. I didn't notice that I bowled little Rachel over as I bolted out the door. I didn't hear the shouts of surprise when I leapt over the low wall at the edge of our house. I don't believe half the stories I heard later. All I knew at the time was that He was here at last. My Jesus. My Lord and my friend. The man at whose feet I would find peace. The peace I had been too busied to be wise enough to seek before now.

MIRIAM

That's how it always felt to me, when I spoke for God and His people. Like the rest of the world becoming something of a blur, not quite so real. There was a quiet, like a numb disbelief and then a prayer answered anyway. And suddenly, I knew what I had to do, saw it so clearly, and, the greater miracle: I had the courage to do it. The world went away, and it all became still, and grace appeared in the least likely form imaginable. That's how it always felt, when God intervened.

NAOMI

Ruth was a woman built to love: built to bear any weight, shoulder any cross, and fight any battle to love. She spent her life as if in search of an object worthy of the fierceness of her love, and I was surprised as she could never seem to understand to find that it was me. And through me, my God. I knew that whatever came of it, I would not see the fire of that love crushed even if it meant continuing on - even if it meant tethering myself to this life. Because it was a fearsome and beautiful thing to behold - the way that Ruth loved when at last she truly loved with all of her soul.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

I am shocked to realize now what a small measure of grace I would have settled for. What an insignificant blessing I would have cradled like salvation itself - which is what He came to offer me instead.

MARTHA

I didn't know how strong I was, how much I could bear, how deep my faith ran, until that moment. Until I stood before my God and could say it. You chose that my brother should die. I believe in You, I hope in You. You know better than I. Twice in my life, I have thought I had to make a place for death, teach my heart how to survive its ravages. Twice in my life, I have sat by a dead body and made myself accept it, made myself forge a self that could live without my brother or my Lord. And twice, You have shown me that it is unnecessary. It is only a parting. It is only a temporary parting. It is only the first blink of sorrow that presages the reunion to come.

NAOMI

The tears of relief but also shame - shame to think that I had so insisted that I was alone - that I had been abandoned by my God. Shame at the gentleness of the rebuke that was the plenty in her arms. The love of God, and family, that I had forgotten. The Love I should have seen and known for what it was that day on the road with Ruth. The love I had overlooked as something extraordinary about her alone, rather than an arm of the love of God.

MARY MAGDALENE

I was the woman he rescued from the tower. But He also taught me to fight the battles when He was gone.

MARY OF BETHANY

They will never understand, on the outside. Only those who have felt that moment, when the truth of what God has done for us overflow the bounds we use to keep it in check so that we might live our lives from day to day. Only they will understand why three hundred denarii is mere dust on His feet - that it was foolishness to do it not because the money was better spent on the poor but because but for the love of God we are all dust on His feet, however much men would covet us. It cannot look like anything but foolishness, because what God has done, in coming down, in taking human form, looks like a kind of foolishness to us. And the only way to answer divine foolish kindness is with human foolish thanksgiving, knowing that even that is made beautiful only by the love He pours into us.

RUTH

Strange little things we do because the mind of God is unfathomable. Strange little things that remind us He is watching over us.

JOANNA

The wind that came from heaven was deafening. The flame was blinding. It burned away everything that had held back my voice. I could not longer see or hear anything but the still, quiet voice in my heart. I scarcely knew when it filled my throat and poured from my lips and when I remained silent, transfixed with the love of God coursing through me as I had never known.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

Come see a man who told me everything I ever did and loved me anyway. Come see a holy man who did not look down on my fallen state. Come see a prophet who knew my every fault and treated me only as a fellow child of God. Could this be the Messiah? Not a figure of fire and judgment and punishment and war. Not a purging of all that steps outside of narrow precepts. A man who extends love to all, even knowing every fault. Could this be the Messiah? Could we possibly be that lucky? Could we possibly be that blessed? Could we possibly be that loved?

ELIZABETH

Anything that would have kept him from the divine message he bears - that lights him up like a Christmas tree - I bore it for him.